There is a difference between being an employee and owning your own business. When you are an employee your employer holds you accountable whereas when you own your own business a big part of accountability comes from within, not somebody else. Your clients also hold you accountable but most of it comes from you. This is true with any type of business whether it be web design, virtual assistant, consulting, sales, retail etc.

Accountability

When you own your own business you have to hold yourself accountable. Just because nobody is breathing down your neck, doesn’t mean you don’t have to do a good job. If you really in truly want a successful business you need to make sacrifices. Your clients are counting on you. If you don’t do a good job you are letting yourself down as well as your clients. Your clients hired you because they need help not because they want somebody to keep giving them excuses.

Self Discipline

Running a business requires a lot of self discipline. There will be things that you don’t want to do and it’s a lot easier to convince yourself that you can do it tomorrow or later or whatever than it is to handle the tough jobs.

There may be days when you wake up in the morning and it’s a beautiful day and you would rather go to the beach than stay at home behind a computer and do the work that your clients need you to. That’s when self discipline really gets put to the test.

Exaggerating/Lying

Exaggerating is the same as lying. It’s okay to tell a potential client or even a current client that you don’t know how to do something. This will look much better for you. If you tell a potential client that you don’t know how to do something you leave them with the choice as to whether to work with you and be patient while you learn or to go and work with somebody else who has the experience.

If you lie to them or exaggerate your abilities thinking that you can just post your questions on a forum and get the right answer, it leaves you and your client feeling frustrated and gives your client a false sense of professionalism on your part. This can cause you to lose your self confidence and cause the client to lose confidence in you, giving you and your industry a bad rep.

Colleagues

While you may believe that being unaccountable, undisciplined, exaggerating and lying is only hurting yourself, you are wrong. It not only hurts your clients it also hurts your colleagues. By you believing that it is only hurting you, it makes it difficult for the “good” virtual assistants, web designers, consultants to keep their business successful. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen these words “I have been burned so many times” or “my past web designer created my site and has since fallen off the face of the earth and my site’s not working etc”

If you don’t have accountability and self discipline you will immediately fail in owning your own business. With the advent of Twitter, Facebook, and blogging people are more apt to take their grievances to the web, tarnishing your reputation in the process.

When you don’t have good business standards and are lucky enough to get clients and they leave to find somebody else, it immediately puts them on the defensive causing them to be nasty, ignorant, pushy etc and this can greatly hinder their chance of finding a good match that will be a GREAT asset to their company. I don’t know about you but if I get somebody to contact me and they come across as if they are looking for a fight, I won’t work with them. So they are left to fend for themselves hindering their business success.

So the next time you think your business standards are only hurting yourself, think about those clients that are also being hurt and the colleagues who are having a much more difficult time finding clients because those clients have been “burned.”

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Time and time again I am hearing how people are just not happy with their Joomla website and they are not happy with VirtueMart (Joomla’s shopping cart).  Their complaints are the structures are just not user friendly when in reality, with the proper training Joomla and Virtuemart is not any harder to use than WordPress or 1Shopping Cart.

The problem is that Joomla comes with so many functions already enabled. People get lost. Once they understand that they can learn to create an article and manage it, then they can learn to move modules, etc, and that they can learn one thing at a time and not get confused by it all at once, Joomla starts to make sense.

Case Study

I met a fellow virtual assistant who had a Joomla site and she was ready to throw in the towel and move it to a WordPress website.  This is fine but she eventually wanted to give away things, have a newsletter and other things that could be accomplished with WordPress but she would either have to pay for these services or she would be using WordPress for something that it was never intended for which is a complex website and she would’ve eventually ran into problems.

She reached out for help and I answered her and spent two hours working with her (she basically needed a full education on how to use her site because her designer created the site, got paid and walked away, which is unfortunate) and she is now much happier with her website.

Her complaint was also that it was not user friendly but once I helped her understand how to do things to her website, she realized it’s really not that un-user friendly.

When you are not use to web design and shopping carts and how they work, whether you use WordPress, Joomla, 1Shopping Cart or Virtuemart, it can all seem overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.  All you have to do is reach out and find the right person who is willing to take the time and teach you.

With the fast-pace of your life, you may not want to learn something new and that’s fine but if you don’t take the time to learn, it can leave you frustrated and cost you a lot of money.  Even if you have somebody update the site for you, you have to pay them every time or if you try to learn things on your own without somebody in the background to help you out it will cost you in lost time and frustration.

So before you give up on something because you feel it is non-user friendly, reach out and find somebody who is willing to take the time to work with you and educate you because you may just find that you were just uneducated on the item.  Being uneducated can be detrimental to your business and cause great confusion.

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Starting a business is not something you can do overnight.  It takes several weeks or even months to get it to the point where you are ready to open for business. You need to do research and I’m not talking just market research but other research as well.

In order to be sure that you are operating your business legally, you need to check into local, state, and federal laws regarding your industry.  If you want to run your business out of your home, you need to check with the local laws regarding whether or not this is allowed. Some questions to ask are:

1. If you want to run this business out of your house, are you legally allowed to?  If your neighborhood is zoned residential, you may not be able to.
2. Do you need any kind of permit for your business? i.e. zoning permit
3. Do you need any type of special license for your business? In Pennsylvania, they were trying to pass a law that if you sell items on consignment on Ebay, you need an auctioneers license (don’t know if it passed or not)
4. Are you allowed to post a sign outside of your house and if so what are the size restrictions?
5. If you sell services/products online, where do you need to collect sales tax from?  For example, if I am doing work for somebody in PA, I have to collect sales tax however if I do work for somebody in Kansas, I don’t have to collect sales tax.
6. What type of business entity are you going to run under? i.e. sole proprietor, limited liability, corporation, partnership, etc
7. What taxes do you need to pay both locally, state and federally?

Insurance

1. Is your business something that if something is done incorrectly you can cause injury to somebody or something? i.e. Dog walking: If you walk a dog and it gets loose and it bites somebody or causes an accident, you can be held liable because you did not have control of that animal. Also if the dog gets loose and is hit by a car the dog owner can also hold you liable.  Do you have measures in place so that you do not loose everything should you get sued?
2. Is your business something that can cause emotional or monetary damage if something is done incorrectly? i.e. Giving some wrong information on a person to a collection agency so they start contacting the wrong person to get payments for delinquent accounts.  The wrong person can sue the collection agency and the collection agency will then, in turn, sue you.
3. Do you need to be bonded?

Market research

1. Is there a market for your type of business?
2. How do you measure up to the competition?  How are you different from the competition?
3. What is your ideal market? Age, gender, income, etc
4. Where does your ideal market hang out?
5. If you use statistical data to analyze need and demand, remember, statistics can only tell you what HAS BEEN. It cannot tell you what WILL BE. If you do business differently, better, etc, than the competition, you may be able to succeed even in a crowded market. It only gives you a guideline as to how creative you will need to be to succeed.

Marketing Research

1. How do you plan on reaching out to your ideal market?
2. Can you make your own brochures, letterhead, and business cards or are you going to purchase them?
3. Are you going to market locally, regionally, or nationally?
4. What do you need to do to market to that locale?
5. Are you going to have a website?  Can you create the website on your own or are you going to have to hire somebody?

Pricing/Forms

1. How much do you want to make monthly or yearly?
2. How much do you need to make to be sustainable?
3. How much is your competition charging? Is it higher or lower?  You can’t always base your prices on this but it can give you an idea
4. What forms do you need for your clients to understand your policies?
5. What policies are you going to implement and can you stick to them?
6. What forms do you need to protect yourself and your company?

While running a business can be a great opportunity there is a lot that needs to be done and taken into consideration before you can even open your doors and start welcoming clients.  Even after you open your doors, it takes time to get clients and you have to continue to work at it.

Running a business is not as simple as waking up one morning and saying I’m going to open a business so that I can control my own destiny. You MUST do your due diligence!

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A service type business should be getting between 200-500 unique visitors per month if you expect to get ANY calls. If you aren’t getting that many, chances are the design has nothing to do with it. The marketing is what the culprit is. If you are getting less than 200 visits per month then your website is not getting found by the search engines. Yes your website may be listed on page one for the website URL but that doesn’t mean it is getting found by any other keywords or phrases.

In order to get your website found you need to continue to market it. You can have the best basic SEO out there, the best design out there but if you aren’t getting traffic you aren’t marketing it enough.

It is not enough to join Facebook and create a business page and ask to connect. It is not enough to join Twitter and post to your hearts content and follow thousands of people. You have to do more than that.

You have to submit your website to link directories, comment on blog posts with your URL, write articles and submit them to article directories with your URL in the Author box, create a blog and update it consistently and make sure that you put your URL on the blog, find forums that your target market hangs out at and participate and if you are allowed, use your URL in your signature line and make it linkable, find directories that your target market may frequent and add your URL there. The possibilities are endless.

If you are marketing well, and have solid traffic, and the orders are not coming, then it’s time to take another look within your website and see where you think you may be able to improve. If you don’t know where to improve, feel free to contact us for a free website review.

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One of the problems we ran into was our neighbors. They have an old house and they have a lot of cases of unfinished projectitis.  They have a lot of old lawnmowers, old motorcycles, and old cars laying around in their yard.  They are items that they purchased intending to fix up but some how never got around to it.  They don’t live right next door, they are kitty-corner from us and we have trees and a fence that the previous owners of our house put up so they didn’t have to look at the items.  Automatically because of these neighbors people turned their noses up at our house and weren’t interested.

Sure, they have stuff laying around but they don’t do anything illegal, it is their property therefore it is their right to have that stuff, I do not have rats, snakes etc coming over to my property because of their junk, they do not have parties at all hours of the night.  They leave us alone and we leave them. When we have talked to them, they have been nothing but polite and neighborly to us. People who don’t know them always ask us “how are they for neighbors?”  We always tell them the same thing, their fine. Actually besides their junk they are the best neighbors you could ask for.

I understand where these people are coming from because as human beings we are visual beings.  No matter how much people try to deny it, we judge by what we see and if your website is not up to par, you will be judged and you will lose clients.

It doesn’t matter if your SEO is remarkable, you are ranked number one on search engines for specific keywords or if you are the best business around, if your website is bad, you will lose clients.  If your website is sloppy, unorganized, and hard to navigate your visitors will notice that and that will reflect badly on you and your business.

As a small business, you will need all the help that you can get to make it a success so don’t cut corners by trying to do your website yourself if you have no knowledge of web design because there are several elements that makes a website good that you may not be aware of.  Hiring a good web designer could be worth it’s weight in gold when creating a professional, appealing website that gets you business.

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You have to consider how you plan on selling your products or services.  Do you plan on doing a brick and mortar store, selling online, or both? You have to decide what is right for your area.

Brick and Mortar

When considering a brick and mortar store you have to look at your community.  If you are selling high-end goods can your community handle the extra cost? Is your community a large community? What is your community income median? Are there other businesses that are selling what you have?  What makes your store different from those other stores?  It can’t be just great customer service.  It has to be more than that. Will your business be sustainable if you focus on local or will you have to go regional?

If you do a traditional brick and mortar store you will want to seriously consider at least a brochure type website because when people are looking for something particular, chances are they will turn to the web before they turn to their phone book or drive around looking for a store.

Selling Online

When selling strictly online, you have to look at what others online are selling-how they stand out from the crowd. You have to see what they are doing that you think is wrong or what you like about what they are doing and incorporate it into your own business model and website.  It might even be helpful to contact those companies and tell them who you are and what you are interested in doing.  Some may be rude and not want to help you at all and others will be more than willing to give you tips and offer you help. If you run into some of the rude business owners, don’t take it personally they may just be afraid of competition.

There are thousands of websites out there that are selling what you are selling so you have to figure out how to stand out from the crowd.  If you are selling strictly online, you may want to hire a professional web designer because since there is no brick and mortar store, there is no way for your potential customers to be sure that you are who you say you are and that you provide a good quality product or service and the right professional can be worth their weight in gold. If your website is of poor quality, that will directly effect the perception that people have of you and your company. Not to mention SEO is extremely important for getting found online and if you aren’t sure of how to go about doing SEO, it could hurt your business success severely. You will also want to be sure that your site meets PCI Compliance requirements, and that it has return policies clearly stated.

Brick and Mortar and Online

When you decide to use both a brick and mortar store and sell online there are a few additional items that need to be considered.  You have to be sure that you can handle the workflow that selling both online and traditionally will produce.

If you are selling a product, you need to be sure that you will have enough inventory to please both the online people as well as the offline people.  If you don’t have enough inventory to supply your online customers and they have to wait for a long time to get their product that will reflect poorly on your business.  However, if you don’t have enough inventory to supply your offline customers and they come in to purchase a particular item and it is continuously out of stock, they will shop someplace else.  When you first open, you can start out with a low inventory just to see how everything works and get a feel for what may be the most popular because chances are, people will not be waiting in line to get in the door on the day of your grand opening so you will have a chance for some trial and error.

When selling online, you have to be sure that you take into consideration shipping costs, ways for people to pay you online, and you have to have a functional shopping cart so that people can come to your site, add what they want, pay for it and be aware of how long it will take for them to receive it and what type of courier service it is coming from.

Whether or not there is a market for your particular product or service is not the only question to ask when starting a business.  The real question to ask is what do I need to do to bring customers/clients to my store or website? The truth is there is probably a market for just about anything and as a business owner, it is your job to figure out what to do to get customers and how to keep your business sustainable.

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Easter morning she got it and was so excited except of course it was pink and not the teal color she liked so much (they were sold out). Anyway, the outfit is a long shirt with a pair of leggings and she saw the leggings and said I don’t know why the Easter bunny got me pants because this is a dress so I don’t need them.  Mind you, my daughter is 5 years old. Anyway, I explained to her that it wasn’t a dress just a long shirt and she had to wear pants with it, she argued.  I told her that I would ask my mom and sister in law for their opinion at Easter dinner and of course they agreed with me however, that is not good enough for my daughter.  She is still convinced that it is a dress.

This whole ordeal got me thinking about a couple of recent encounters I have had with clients. The most recent one was a person who was looking for help because their website was displaying incorrectly in IE (unfortunately this happens frequently). It was cutting off the complete lower half of the site.

It was beyond my expertise but I contacted a colleague of me that could help me out and we looked at the code and come to find out the most logical problem with it is that they put a height restriction on the site.  When you put a height restriction on a site, IE goes to that height and then completely cuts off the rest of the site.

I told the client about this who then proceeded to tell his web developer.  This web developer emailed me and told me that the code wasn’t the problem but didn’t even know what the problem was and wouldn’t even test to see (sorry but if the site isn’t displaying correctly the only thing it could be is a coding issue). The web developer proceeded to tell the client he needs to redesign the site.

I felt sorry for the client because chances are he will be charged even more for the additional work when chances are all the developer has to do is remove the height restriction and it will work.  I don’t care how long you have been doing web design, there is always a chance that you added something or left out something that is essential to that site displaying properly. When I checked this morning the site was still not displaying properly and they are paying for advertising and marketing and the majority of people still use IE so that poor client is losing business because of the web developers unwillingness to admit he possibly made a mistake.

Another client that I have been working with is a VA.  She has a client who is getting a website developed using Joomla.  Unfortunately she chose a web designer who charges by the hour and quite honestly knows nothing about Joomla.

I’ve been trying to help her out with this client and one of the problems they were having was adding 1SC and Amember to the site. I explained to the VA that with Joomla she doesn’t need to pay for 1SC and Amember because Joomla has free extensions that will handle the job nicely without an extra fee. Plus, if you get too many different applications running in a website that are not created specifically for that site structure you run into a lot of headaches-headaches that can be avoided.

I explained the extensions to the VA who said that her client won’t be interested because her site is already over budget and past due. I told her I would talk to her client for her and explain it to her because it will actually save her a ton of money and headaches in the long run. I then got an email saying they went in a different direction.  A couple of months later, I get an email from this same VA asking for assistance on some other matters and I explained to her that in order to get the results she was looking for, I would have to redo the template not redesign, just redo the template to get the effects she wanted. The VA then proceeded to tell me that she doesn’t need my services at this time.

Obviously this client’s site is still not up and running properly. Had I been able to talk to the client in the beginning I could have gotten all the things that she wanted done completely and her site up and running and making her money a long time ago.  I know that sounds arrogant but the problems that she is having are simple problems, problems that can be taken care of with the correct extensions and a web designer with the know-how.

These clients ASKED for expert help. They got it, and then continued to fumble around messing things up because they wouldn’t listen to the simpler information. They over complicated things and did not take the advice they asked for.

You run into people like that. You tell them it is a shirt, and they insist it is a dress, and end up with their backside exposed.

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Keep Volunteers Informed

In order for volunteering to work well, you need to keep each individual volunteer abreast of the different procedures, tasks, and policies that they need to be aware of. Don’t assume the volunteers can read your mind!

Listen To The Volunteers

Volunteers have become volunteers because they are experienced in the department that you needed help with.

This doesn’t mean that you have to take them at their word because nobody knows everything about their particular field but they do know quite a bit and chances are the input they give will help the organization prosper. If you decide not to go with their ideas, tell them why so as not to leave hurt feelings and help them understand why you went the way you decided.  It needs to be more of a reason than just because “I thought it would be better”.

Reply ASAP

If you get a person inquiring about volunteering with your organization and they contact you either by phone or email, get back to them ASAP. Nothing says unorganized, unprofessional, and unappreciative more than not getting a response when someone is offering their services free of charge. Chances are the return call or return email will take only a few minutes that could lead to a long lasting volunteer relationship.

Don’t Expect To Be Chased

If somebody contacts you to offer their help and you don’t get back to them, or you get back to them once and then you don’t contact them again, don’t expect them to continue to hound you to give you free help, they have more important things to do.

Accept What They Can Offer

Volunteers are not employees. Sure, you want to be able to rely on them, but realistically, they are fitting you into their spare time. When life gets hectic, they’ll come and go a bit. When you rely on what other people can freely give, you have to appreciate what they can give, and shrug it off when they can’t give anymore, or when they can’t be there when you thought they should. This is just the reality. You can’t make them punch a clock, and if you make it too hard for them to volunteer, they’ll simply wander off and go offer their services elsewhere.

Volunteer Only Staffing Is A Limiting Thing

There will come a point in every organization, where they will simply implode if they rely strictly on volunteer staffing. Volunteers cannot work full schedules, so you end up having to have 10-20 people to do the job that one full time employee could do. This means your time spent training new people, coordinating work loads, and handling volunteer benefits (if you offer them) becomes unmanageable. Turnover becomes a huge issue with that many people, feedback now comes from all those people as each one tries to remake your organization in the way they think is best, and eventually the whole system breaks down and nothing gets done. Doggedly trying to utilize 100% volunteer staffing beyond this point of implosion will ruin an organization – and has ruined many. This is a prime reason why non-profit organizations seem to fade out very quickly after they file for tax exempt status.

The truth about volunteers is they volunteer because they want to.  They love the concept of the organization and they want to use their expertise to help the organization become prosperous. They love feeling like they are a part of something bigger than themselves.

However, you have to remember that nothing in life is free.  While these volunteers are helping YOU for free, they are spending THEIR time to make the organization better. If they feel unappreciated, uninformed, rejected and unworthy of a response, they will walk away as quickly as they volunteered.

Remember, just because you aren’t paying them doesn’t mean they are any less of an important part of your organization.

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As a website owner you also want to keep your clients and customers informed with what’s going on in your business and portray yourself as the expert in your chosen field so you start a newsletter.

The most popular service for both a shopping cart and a newsletter is by far 1SC (1Shopping Cart). After all, spending $99/month to offer a newsletter, physical products and downloadable products seems like a steal considering how much you believe you will earn from your products.

The truth is it takes time to get a website found online and even when it does get found, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your visitors will purchase your products.  You have to have a superior product and portray that throughout your website.  Your newsletter has to have something of interest for it to get subscribers.

Depending on what you charge for your product, it could take you a long time to just break even when paying $99/month. What if there was an alternative to that costly monthly fee?

There is and it’s called Virtuemart and Acajoom. Virtuemart and Acajoom are made specifically for the CMS, Joomla and they are both free.

Virtuemart-

Virtuemart is a fully functional, high powered shopping cart made specifically for Joomla.  Some of the features it includes are:

• Shopper groups-this allows you to be able to offer discounts to customer A but not customer B.  This is a great feature so that you can offer discounts to repeat customers.
• Multiple currency
• Shipping address based tax calculation
• Unlimited number of products
• Online Catalog
• Featured products
• RSS feeds to update subscribers on new products
• Easily add and remove products
• Live credit card processing or pre-defined payment gateways like paypal, authorize.net and more

Acajoom-

• Unlimited subscribers
• Subscription through URL
• Create a default HTML template for each mailing
• Unlimited lists, you can have a list for marketing tips, a list for startup tips, a list for whatever you want and have different subscribers to each.

You may be saying it’s great that all this stuff is free but I already have a website so I don’t want to redo it.  That’s perfectly understandable.

It will cost you approximately $900 or less to get a full-featured shopping cart, newsletter manager, and easy to update website. With 1SC, you are STILL going to either have to put in a LOT of work to set it up, template it, configure it, load the products, etc. In fact, the SAME amount of work that is required for a Joomla site. And you’ll have to either do the work, or pay for it, at about the same rate.

The real comparison is not in setup fees – those are the same. The real comparison is in monthly. A Joomla/VM setup can be maintained for $35 or less per month, and with that, you can often get assistance and advice on how to actually EARN with the site. Compared to 1SC, that’s a significant savings.

Let’s do the math:

Shopping cart and newsletter using 1SC-$99/month
Joomla, Virtuemart and Acajoom-$35/month
1SC for 1 year-$1188
Joomla, Virtuemart, and Acajoom for 1 year-$420
That’s a difference of $768 for 1 year

The proof is in the math.

I understand change is tough. Especially when you have virtual assistants, coaches, marketers etc telling you to stick with 1SC but the truth is, you could really be costing your business a lot of unneeded money waste.

If you don’t mind wasting thousands of dollars to keep in touch with your clients and sell your products online because 1SC is the “norm,” then more power to you. But if you are looking for a cost-effective, long-term solution to your newsletter and shopping cart needs, give us a call and we can help you decide which solution is right for you.

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For example, unless you are targeting other coaches, it is not enough to just hold a seminar about being a coach.  You have to hold a seminar that is more focused such as how to get ahead of the crowd in business, how to gain self-confidence, or how to handle the more difficult aspects of business.

Potential clients don’t care so much about what you do; just how you do it and it works. They want to know that if they implement your strategies and ideals, they will get where they want to be. Once they start implementing your teachings and they see that they work, you will start to get referrals to your business.

If you want to use a Seminar for promoting your services, then the promotion of the services should be only on the edges, not the central content. For example, announcing at the beginning, who you are, and what you do. And then a short suggestion at the end, that they can get more, and where. If you hold an offline seminar, then bring handouts that are branded to give your attendees more info on what you offer, and keep the sales pitches out of the content. The majority of the time you spend should be on TEACHING, not on promoting. This is especially important if you charge for the seminar.

If you do a seminar about your industry and not actually teach them anything, they will come away feeling as if they were cheated and feel as if they just paid to sit through one great big huge advertisement.

For offline seminars, bring your own branded pens, and prepare a printed handout. Put some useful tips on the handout – not your whole presentation, but some nice “ah-ha” bullet points or tips that are useful even if someone DIDN’T attend your seminar. Brand it at the bottom with your logo, contact info, and a short line about what you do. Leave the back blank – for note taking. This handout can serve two purposes – combined with the pens, you just handed people a way to take notes. Plus, you’ve given them a sharable info sheet – bring extras, and invite your audience to share them with friends. If you just hand out business cards or brochures, it won’t have nearly the power it does if you prepare something about the seminar and send them home with that.

The secret to a good seminar is giving your attendees the feeling of empowerment. They need to feel as if they have learned something.

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